Obama Says He Spoke to Victims’ Families as Father, Husband

U.S. President Barack Obama arrives alongside Colorado officials to speak at the University of Colorado Hospital in Aurora, Colorado. Photograph: Saul Loeb via AFP/GettyImages

July 22 (Bloomberg) -- Moments after visiting families
whose relatives were killed in the Colorado shooting, President
Barack Obama addressed the nation with a focus on the actions,
and spirit, of ordinary Americans, confessing that “words are
always inadequate in these situations.”

“I come to them not so much as president as I do a father
and a husband,” Obama said after meeting at a hospital near the
site of the shooting that killed 12 people and wounded 58 during
a showing of the latest Batman movie in Aurora, Colorado.

The conversations showed him “that even in the darkest of
days, life continues,” Obama said, “and people are strong and
people bounce back and people are resilient.”

Obama arrived in Colorado this afternoon and spent about
two and a half hours at the University of Colorado Hospital in
Aurora with families of those who were killed and injured in the
shootings, and with several victims in the hospital’s intensive
care unit. Afterward, he left for San Francisco, to begin a
previously-scheduled campaign trip, with stops in California,
Oregon, Washington, Nevada and Louisiana.

At the hospital, Obama’s meetings were away from public
view. He described his conversations as uplifting, especially a
heroic tale of two young friends.

Neck Wound

With two fingers held up to his neck, Obama recounted how
one friend saved another by compressing a neck vein that had
been punctured by a bullet, “spurting blood.” The uninjured
friend, 21-year-old Stephanie Davies, kept her fingers pressed
on 19-year-old Allie Young’s neck injury through the entire
shooting, called 911 with her free hand, and then helped carry
her to an ambulance. Young lived and will fully recover, the
president said, after speaking with both.

“They represent what’s best in us,” Obama said. ‘They
assure us that our of this darkness, a brighter day will come.’’

It was Obama’s second response to a mass shooting in his
presidency, yet another jolt to the nation, which led some to
call for stricter gun control laws. On January 8, 2011, a gunman
opened fire at a shopping mall in Tucson, killing six and
wounding U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in
the head.

“Any president in moments like these is the comforter-in-chief,” said Robert Shrum, a Democratic speech writer “Like
Ronald Reagan, like Bill Clinton, Obama understands what
presidents have to do in moments like this,” said Bob Shrum.

Reagan’s Legacy

“That’s fundamentally what Reagan did after the
Challenger,” he said. “That’s fundamentally what Clinton did
in Oklahoma City.”

The loss of seven astronauts in the 1986 Challenger
disaster gripped the nation in horror. President Ronald Reagan
turned to faith, as he spoke to during a memorial afterward,
acknowledging the shared pain of a national loss

“We can find consolation only in faith, for we know in our
hearts that you who flew so high and so proud now make your home
beyond the stars, safe in God’s promise of eternal life,”
Reagan said.

Clinton also sought to salve the nation’s wounds after the
Oklahoma City bombing when Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people in
the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma. Four days
after the Tucson shoots, Obama asked Americans to choose
compassion over conflict, when he flew to Tucson last year for a
memorial service at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Trigger Unknown

“The truth is, none of us can know exactly what triggered
this vicious attack,” Obama said at the time. “What we cannot
do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each
other. That we cannot do.”

“It’s one of the things president do,” Shrum said. “but
you can never be political about it, just entirely presidential.
Obama understands that obviously.”

In Aurora today, Obama said it was important to focus on
the heroes rather than the suspect, James Holmes, whom the
president did not mention by name.

He drew upon the heroism of people in the crowd as
illustrations of the heartbreak and hope that emerged from the
chaotic scene after a gunman opened fire at a movie theater, a
half-hour into a showing of the new Batman movie, “The Dark
Knight Rises.”

Obama tried to assure the families and victims that
“although the perpetrator of this evil act has received a lot
of attention over the last couple of days, that attention will
fade away.”

“In the end, after he has felt the full force of our
justice system, what will be remembered are the good people who
were impacted by this tragedy.